Every
poker player who has read any book or magazine article about poker
knows that thinking is a large part of the game. Unfortunately, many
well intentioned players don’t know how to think about poker. They know
there are many important decisions that will affect whether they will
win, but they often don’t know how to get started. This overwhelms them
and causes them to retreat to just playing based on their intuition –
often an unprofitable result.
For those of you who have found yourself in this sort of quandary, let
me start you off in the right direction. This is not meant to be an
exhaustive study – but just the bare bones necessary to focus your
attention on the beginning steps.
Learn the following in this order to improve your game:
1. Good starting hands.
Poker literature is full of them. Go to the bookstore or the library and
look through the poker books to find the good starting hands for the
limit or no limit hold ‘em game you’re playing. Experts may differ on
the bottom of the list, but they are in full agreement of the very best
hands. Learn them..
2. Position
Understand how position affects what hands you play and how you play
your hand. You don’t have to know, with complete certainty, every single
hand you are willing to play from every position. But you should
develop a general understanding of how some hands are better from some
positions than they are from other positions. Use this to determine how
and whether to play your hand.
3. Discipline
Learn to throw away bad hands. Simple as that. Once you apply your
knowledge of good starting hands with your understanding of position,
you need to get away from those unprofitable hands.
4. Aggression
Learn to raise and re-raise with high quality hands. In no limit learn
to bet many multiples of the big blind when the situation calls for it..
5. Evaluate the flop turn and river for yourself.
Ask yourself if the board helped you, and if so how? Learn to understand
how the flop, turn and river helped you. You need to understand,
quickly, how it improved your hand by either making a hand immediately
or giving you powerful draws.
6. Evaluate how the board helped your opponents.
Your hand doesn’t improve in a vacuum. The board applies to everyone
else who is still left in the hand. How was it likely to have helped or
hurt them?
7. What does my opponent(s) probably have?
Where do you stand relative to the other players? This is often tough to
evaluate, requiring as it does that you put a lot of information
together. But you need to put your opponent on at least a range of
hands. Use their betting habits, your rudimentary categorization of them
into a general category of player, and a basic understanding of simple
tells to help you. And make sure to think about your hand relative to
what you think they are likely to have.
8. What are the odds that I and my opponents will improve and what are we likely to improve to?
You need to learn and understand the basic odds for improving hands on
the flop. If you have four of a suit on the flop, for example, what are
the odds you’ll make that flush? Similarly with two pair, with a pair,
etc. Know these. They’re easy to learn; and you must learn them. This
will give you a basic understanding of how likely it is that you will
win the hand if you and your opponent stay until the end.
9. What do I want my opponent to do?
Sometimes you want to induce your opponent to fold. Sometimes you want a
call. Sometimes you want a call of a large bet or a fold. You need to
figure this out based on what you think your opponent is likely to have,
what you have, the odds that your opponent is likely to improve to a
better hand than yours, and the odds that you are getting.
10. How much should I bet?
What size bet will accomplish what you want? Once you’ve determined the
range of hands your opponent is likely to have you need to think about
what you want to do about it. If you think you are behind and likely to
stay behind until the end of the hand, with your opponent either betting
or calling, then you need to check and fold to a bet. If, on the other
hand, you determine that you are either ahead or can convince your
opponent to fold then you need to think about what size bet will
accomplish what you want.
